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The shadow of the Moon can be seen darkening part of Earth. This shadow moved across the Earth at nearly 2000 kilometers per hour. Only observers near the center of the dark circle see a total solar eclipse – others see a partial eclipse where only part of the Sun appears blocked by the Moon. This spectacular picture of the 1999 August 11 solar eclipse was one of the last ever taken from the Mir space station. The two bright spots that appear on the upper left are thought to be Jupiter and Saturn. Mir was deorbited in a controlled re-entry in 2001. A new solar eclipse will occur over North America in about two weeks.
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Paul Brownlee McCandless Jr. (born March 24, 1947) is a multi-instrumentalist and founding member of the American jazz group Oregon. He is one of the few jazz oboists. He also plays bass clarinet, English horn, flute, penny whistle, tenor saxophone, sopranino saxophone, and soprano saxophone.
Paul Brownlee McCandless Jr. was born in Indiana, Pennsylvania, United States, into a musical family. His father (who was also an oboe and English horn player) taught him clarinet, his mother piano, and he attended the Manhattan School of Music. In 1971 he auditioned with the New York Philharmonic playing English horn and was a finalist.
McCandless has released a series of records of his own compositions with bands he led, including All the Mornings Bring (Elektra/Asylum, 1979), Navigator (Landslide, 1981), Heresay (Windham Hill, 1988), Premonition (Windham Hill, 1992). With Oregon, he has recorded over twenty albums, as well as several albums with Paul Winter.
more...Lee Oskar (born 24 March 1948) is a Danish harmonica player, notable for his contributions to the sound of the rock-funk fusion group War, which was formed by Howard E. Scott and Harold Brown, his solo work, and as a harmonicamanufacturer.He continues to play with 3 other original War band members, Harold Brown, Howard Scott and B.B. Dickerson, under the name LowRider Band.
more...Carol Kaye (née Smith; born March 24, 1935) is an American musician. She is one of the most prolific recorded bass guitarists in rock and pop music, playing on an estimated 10,000 recordings in a career spanning over 65 years.
more...Sharpless 2-106 (Sh2-106 or S106 for short) is a bipolar emission nebula and HII region. It measures about 2 light-years long by 0.5 light-year wide and is located about 2,000 light-years away in the constellation of Cygnus (the Swan), in a relatively isolated region of the Milky Way. Its mass may be as high as 25,000 times the mass of our Sun.
more...David Jay Grisman (born March 23, 1945) is an American mandolinist. His music combines bluegrass, folk, and jazz in a genre he calls “Dawg music”. He founded the record label Acoustic Disc, which issues his recordings and those of other acoustic musicians. He was inducted into the International Bluegrass Music Hall of Fame in 2023.
Grisman grew up in a Conservative Jewish household in Passaic, New Jersey. His father was a professional trombonist who gave him piano lessons when he was seven years old. As a teenager, he played piano, mandolin, and saxophone.
In the early 1960s, he attended New York University. He belonged to the Even Dozen Jug Band with Maria Muldaur and John Sebastian. He played in the bluegrass band the Kentuckians led by Red Allen, then in the psychedelic rock band Earth Opera with Peter Rowan. He moved to San Francisco, met Jerry Garcia, and appeared on the Grateful Dead album American Beauty. He played in Garcia’s bluegrass band Old & In the Way with Peter Rowan and Vassar Clements. When Grisman was 17 years old, he was invited on stage by Doc Watson to join him on mandolin for a rendition of “In the Pines”.
more...David Samuel Pike (March 23, 1938 – October 3, 2015) was an American jazz vibraphone and marimbaplayer. He appeared on many albums by Nick Brignola, Paul Bley and Kenny Clarke, Bill Evans, and Herbie Mann. He also recorded extensively as leader, including a number of albums on MPS Records.
He learned drums at the age of eight and was self-taught on vibraphone. Pike made his recording debut with the Paul Bley Quartet in 1958. He began putting an amplifier on his vibes, when working with flautist Herbie Mann in the early-1960s. By the late-1960s, Pike’s music became more exploratory, contributing a unique voice and new contexts that pushed the envelope in times remembered for their exploratory nature. The Doors of Perception, released in 1970 for the Atlantic Records subsidiary Vortex Records, and produced by former boss Herbie Mann, explored ballads, modal territory, musique concrète, with free and lyrical improvisation, and included musicians including alto saxophonist Lee Konitz, bassist Chuck Israels and pianist Don Friedman.
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Granville Henry “Stick” McGhee (March 23, 1918 – August 15, 1961) was an American jump bluesguitarist, singer and songwriter, best known for his blues song “Drinkin’ Wine, Spo-Dee-O-Dee“, which he wrote with J. Mayo Williams.
McGhee was born in Knoxville, Tennessee, and grew up in Kingsport, Tennessee. He received his nickname when he was a child. He used a stick to push a wagon carrying his older brother Brownie McGhee, who had contracted polio. Granville began playing the guitar when he was thirteen years old. After his freshman year he dropped out of high school and worked with his father at the Eastman Kodaksubsidiary, Tennessee Eastman Company in Kingsport. In 1940, Granville quit his job and moved to Portsmouth, Virginia, and then to New York City. He entered the military in 1942 and served in the U.S. Army during World War II. After being discharged in 1946, he settled in New York.
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Accompanying Erev Shabbat Service at Temple Israel Friday March 22nd 6pm. Music with Jayson Rodovsky, Jeff Bailey, Pete Whitman and mick laBriola.
more...IC1871, part of the Soul Nebula also known as Sh2-199 and LBN667 is about 7500 light years distant in the constellation Cassiopeia.
more...Andrew Lloyd Webber, Baron Lloyd-Webber (born 22 March 1948) is an English composer and impresario of musical theatre. Several of his musicals have run for more than a decade both in the West End and on Broadway. He has composed 21 musicals, a song cycle, a set of variations, two film scores, and a Latin Requiem Mass.
Several of Lloyd Webber’s songs have been widely recorded and widely successful outside of their parent musicals, such as “Memory” from Cats, “The Music of the Night” and “All I Ask of You” from The Phantom of the Opera, “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” from Jesus Christ Superstar, “Don’t Cry for Me Argentina” from Evita, and “Any Dream Will Do” from Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat. In 2001, The New York Times referred to him as “the most commercially successful composer in history”. The Daily Telegraph named him in 2008 the fifth-most powerful person in British culture, on which occasion lyricist Don Black said that “Andrew more or less single-handedly reinvented the musical.”
Lloyd Webber has received numerous awards, including a knighthood in 1992, followed by a peerage for services to the arts, six Tonys, seven Olivier Awards, three Grammys (as well as the Grammy Legend Award), an Academy Award, 14 Ivor Novello Awards, a Golden Globe, a Brit Award, the 2006 Kennedy Center Honors, and two Classic Brit Awards (for Outstanding Contribution to Music in 2008, and for Musical Theatre and Education in 2018). In 2018, after Jesus Christ Superstar Live in Concert won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Variety Special (Live), he became the thirteenth person to win an Oscar, an Emmy, a Grammy, and a Tony. He has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, is an inductee into the Songwriters Hall of Fame, and is a fellow of the British Academy of Songwriters, Composers, and Authors.
The Really Useful Group, Lloyd Webber’s company, is one of the largest theatre operators in London. Producers in several parts of the UK have staged productions, including national tours, of Lloyd Webber musicals under licence from the Really Useful Group. He is also the president of the Arts Educational Schools, London, a performing arts school located in Chiswick, West London. Lloyd Webber is involved in a number of charitable activities, including the Elton John AIDS Foundation, Nordoff Robbins, Prostate Cancer UK and War Child. In 1992, he started the Andrew Lloyd Webber Foundation which supports the arts, culture, and heritage of the UK.
more...Stephen Joshua Sondheim (/ˈsɒndhaɪm/; March 22, 1930 – November 26, 2021) was an American composer and lyricist. Regarded as one of the most important figures in 20th-century musical theater, he is credited with reinventing the American musical. With his frequent collaborations with Harold Prince and James Lapine, Sondheim’s Broadway musicals tackled unexpected themes that ranged beyond the genre’s traditional subjects, while addressing darker elements of the human experience. His music and lyrics were tinged with complexity, sophistication, and ambivalence about various aspects of life.
Sondheim’s interest in musical theater began at a young age, and he was mentored by Oscar Hammerstein II. He began his career by writing the lyrics for West Side Story (1957) and Gypsy (1959). He transitioned to writing both music and lyrics for the theater, with his best-known works including A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1962), Company (1970), Follies (1971), A Little Night Music(1973), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1979), Merrily We Roll Along (1981), Sunday in the Park with George (1984), Into the Woods (1987), and Passion (1994).
Sondheim’s numerous awards and nominations include eight Tony Awards, an Academy Award, eight Grammy Awards, an Olivier Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. He also was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor in 1993 and a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2015.[6] A theater is named after him both on Broadway and in the West End of London. Film adaptations of his works include West Side Story (1961), Gypsy (1962), A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum (1966), A Little Night Music (1977), Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street (2007), Into the Woods (2014), and West Side Story(2021).
more...George Washington Benson (born March 22, 1943) is an American guitarist, singer, and songwriter. He began his professional career at the age of 19 as a jazz guitarist.
A former child prodigy, Benson first came to prominence in the 1960s, playing soul jazz with Jack McDuffand others. He then launched a successful solo career, alternating between jazz, pop, R&B singing, and scat singing. His album Breezin’ was certified triple-platinum, hitting no. 1 on the Billboard album chart in 1976. His concerts were well attended through the 1980s, and he still has a large following. Benson has won ten Grammy Awards and has been honored with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.
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